Rhinestone Cowboy

larry weiss, then glen campbell

Larry Weiss wrote and recorded it in 1974 for his album Black and Blue Suite; his single got to number ten on the easy listening chart, and the album all but disappeared. Glen Campbell heard it on KNX-FM while driving in Los Angeles in April 1974 and learned it on a tour of Australia, so when the producer Dennis Lambert played it to him as a song for his next Capitol album, Campbell already knew it. His version came out on 26 May 1975 and was a hit with country and pop audiences at once.

the encore cover

It was one of three covers Radiohead played at the Jericho Tavern in Oxford on 22 August 1992, with “Money (That's What I Want)” and “Hooked on Classics”, on one of a run of nights when young Oxford bands played other people's songs.

In February 1993, at Sheffield Hallam University, with the sound man gone to eat, they played it at soundcheck to an empty student bar and to Jon Dennis of Blab Happy, their support, on a barstool. On 23 February it was in the Black Session they played live on France Inter in Paris. In April it was the last of seven encore songs on their third night at the Roxane in Tel Aviv, and on their first club tour of mainland Europe it ended the night at the Barbue in Copenhagen on 3 June. The tour finished in Paris on 20 June, with “Rhinestone Cowboy” ending the encore again.